I don't see them as helpful (you'll notice in print mode the website leaves them out). I figured out how to remove them, if anyone else is interested. In addition to adding 'caption-video' to 'remove-tags', I needed to add the following 'dict(name='h4', attrs={'class': 'headline'})' to get rid of an extra headline that was showing up. My code is here:
https://github.com/jfhutson/calibre-...ter/nyt.recipe (with several other modifications).